Authors :

Steven Shiau

Ceasar Sun

Jazz Wang

Thomas Tsai

Kuo-Lien Huang

Jean-Francois Nifenecker

Clonezilla

Most people and companies think they can rebuild system by backing up
critical data. However, when catastrophe failure occurs, they lose
all, including entire operating system, data, setting and
applications. Therefore disaster recovery is always an issue not only
for enterprise but also for a person.

Clonezilla, the January’s Project Of The Month on sourceforge.net
[2], is licensed under GPL. It is a partition or disk cloning tool
similar to Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image. Based on partclone,
DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, Clonezilla allows you
to do system deployment and bare metal backup and recovery. The file
systems supported by Clonezilla are ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs,
reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of
Mac OS.

Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla
SE (Server Edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine
backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it
can clone many (40 plus !) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves
and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. This increases the
clone efficiency. E.g. Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers
simultaneously, and it took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 G
Bytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting !

So far the download number of Clonezilla is more than 1,500,000,
that implies it’s a reliable and popular tool.

In this talk, we will cover how to :

1. Use Clonezilla live to do a bare metal recovery and disk clone
2. Create your own recovery CD or USB flash drive
3. Use Clonezilla SE to do massive deployments

A live demonstration about Clonezilla will be done in the talk, too.

Biography

Steven Shiau is a researcher at the NCHC (National Center for
High-performance Computing), Taiwan. While there he wrote parallel and
distributed program to simulate plasma. This program formed the basic
idea for the future development of the free software DRBL (Diskless
Remote Boot in Linux), a rapid deployment software for distributed PC
cluster and education environment. With Kuo-Lien Huang, Ceasar Sun,
Jazz Wang and Thomas Tsai, he developed another free software
"Clonezilla", an open source clone system. He has given more than 50
lessons about DRBL and Clonezilla in Taiwan from 2002, 4 talks in
Libre Software Meeting in France since 2006, and 1 talk in
linux.conf.au in 2010. The project DRBL won first place in ’Public
Sector Applications’ category at the Free Software Contest in France
in 2007. He is the division leader of Grid technology division at NCHC
now, and spends most of his time in the development of DRBL,
Clonezilla and promoting the use of free software and high-performance
computing.